Why binning continuous data is almost always a mistake

Peter Flom
Sep 8, 2018 · 4 min read
Fisher iris data sepal width — from Wikipedia

Substantive problems

Substantively, it invokes “magical thinking” — that is, that something huge happens at the cutoff. E.g., Some neonatologists (doctors who study newborn babies) categorize newborns into “low birth weight” and “normal” often using a cutoff of 2.5 kg. Some add another category of “very low birth weight” for under 1.5 kg. In this method, a…

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